I am on my neurology prac at the moment and am really struggling with a few aspects of neuro. As a student, we have been taught all this information about treating a person post stroke, and have gone into great detail on this. So, coming into this prac, I was under the impression that by doing all these things, I would really see a change in my patients. However, I have been there three weeks and have been seeing certain patients twice a day and have still not really seen any improvement. This was really getting me down until this past week. I honestly was feeling like I was selling the patients short, and that I didn’t feel that these patients should have students treating them. I felt that I was really impacting on their recovery in a bad way, considering that with stroke patients we are trying to retrain normal movement patterns, and as we are only students, we can`t really notice everything that a patient is doing wrong and be able to correct it.
I spoke to my supervisor about it, and she explained to me that it basically has nothing to do with us as students. She explained that the prognosis of recovery from a stroke is largely based on where the stroke occurred. She used my patient with a basal ganglia stroke as an example, saying his chances of recovering upper limb function were much less. She said that if it wasn’t for us students, most of the patients would miss out on treatment sessions. And she also added that if the supervisors thought we were doing anything that was interfering with the patients normal recovery then the supervisors would have intervened very early on.
This really helped me understand that even the knowledge we gained from class is enough for us to be effective therapists and give our patients a thorough treatment, even if we don’t think so. The key thing I have learnt is that it is good to talk about any questions you have, even when we are all qualified, we should never think we know enough to stop asking. And also, that continuing education should something that all of us take seriously, so that we continue learning new treatment techniques which will be of advantage to our patients.
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4 comments:
Its nice to know that as students we are doing more than we think. We are not only treating patients but also taking some of the work load off our supervisors. During my placements a lot of my supervisors have really appreciated having students because its one less patient they have to treat. Its nice to be thanked for what we do not only from the patients but from the physios as well. This is something I will remember to do and say to my students if I am ever a supervisor.
i totally aggree. Sometimes its nice to be thanked for your help, especially if you have taken on extra work to assist or help out. On occasions i have felt like a glorified slave just taking on extra tasks that nobody else wants to do because we cant speak up. thankfully thats not the case the majority of the time!
I third this thought. Sometimes as students we can think that what we are doing is so inadequate. But we are in the fortunate situation of being able to spend a lot of time with the patients and really assess and treat them thoroughly. I guess we will be better able to assess the effectiveness of our treatment with more experience.
having had two stroke placements one for neuro one for international ive learnt that you work very very hard for small minor looking things and the most important thing to do is celebrate these differences as even a tiny wiggle of the toes after an hour of streching and LL facilitation can actually boost a patients mood especially if you get really excited (then they think its an amazing result and work just as hard next time) you also have to think that these patients are getting 2x a day instead of just once and that is so important in their early treatment! just keep trying and dont give up on somthing just because the results are minimal, it can take months for a child to learn how to sit up, over a year to learn how to walk, so you have to see it in that light that they are reforming those parts lost by the stroke just like a child. we get 5 weeks so getting even a slight improvement in sitting is a massive thing!
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